Pamela Colloff

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Pamela Colloff is an American journalist. She has contributed to The New Yorker , but a majority of her work has been featured in Texas Monthly , where she was an executive editor. As of 2017, Colloff is a senior reporter at ProPublica and a writer-at-large at The New York Times Magazine . [1] [2]

Contents

Early life

Colloff and her brother, David, were raised in Manhattan. [3] Her father, Roger D. Colloff, was vice president and general manager of WCBS-TV in New York City. [3] Her mother, Margery A. Colloff, is counsel to a law firm. [4]

Colloff began writing during high school when she was 17 years old. [5] She interviewed Beat poet Allen Ginsberg when he came to her New York City high school. [5] The transcript would later be published in an "alternative newspaper" that Colloff and others published their senior year of high school. [5]

Because Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, did not offer a journalism degree, Colloff majored in English literature. [6] While at Brown, Colloff completed several independent studies in which she focused on long-form journalism. [5] Some of these stories were published in a now-defunct college magazine and were picked up by the Associated Press. [7]

Career

Colloff moved to Austin, Texas, after college and sought freelancing opportunities. [5] She wrote for Texas Highway Patrol , a local trade magazine, before working for Might magazine and Details. [8] In 1997, Colloff began working for Texas Monthly as a staff writer, and later as an executive editor. [6] As of 2017, Colloff is a senior reporter at ProPublica and a writer-at-large at The New York Times Magazine . [1] [2]

Style

Many of Colloff's crime stories require extensive research. [9] To understand the trials, she reads through court transcripts; re-interviews witnesses, police, investigators and attorneys; and talks to medical and legal experts to understand the jargon. Colloff tries to keep information as simple as possible so that the audience can easily understand it. [9]

Colloff builds suspense and momentum in her stories by revealing information at crucial moments. [9] Knowing that many readers now have short attention spans, Colloff tries to keep the reader engaged by using cliffhangers in her writing. This can be seen in "The Innocent Man," which was broken into two stories published a month apart from each other. [5]

"Innocence Lost" and "Innocence Found"

Colloff's two-part story, "Innocence Lost" [10] and "Innocence Found" [11] are about death row inmate Anthony Charles Graves, who was wrongly convicted in 1992 for the murder of a family in Somerville, Texas. [10] After spending 18 years behind bars, Graves was freed in part due to Colloff's writing. [12]

While writing this series, Colloff interviewed the prosecutor among other key witnesses. Colloff noticed discrepancies between the prosecutor's version of events and those presented by the police reports and testimonies in court. [9] She used these inconsistencies in her series to highlight how Graves was wrongly convicted.

Colloff's reporting of Graves' wrongful conviction had lasting consequences. One month after Colloff published "Innocence Lost," the Burleson County district attorney's office dropped all charges against Graves and released him from jail. [12] Many[ who? ] believe Colloff's stories were the persuading factor that helped Graves to win his freedom. [6]

"The Innocent Man"

Colloff's "The Innocent Man" is another two-part story she published about a wrongful conviction. In 1986, Michael Morton was convicted for the murder of his wife. [13] After being wrongfully incarcerated for 25 years, Morton received freedom and public recognition of his innocence. [14] "The Innocent Man" earned Colloff a nomination for the National Magazine Award that she won. [12]

Initially, "The Innocent Man" was to be published as one cohesive piece instead of a two-part series. [5] Colloff's editor suggested breaking the story into two parts when the story reached 16,000 words. [5]

"96 Minutes"

In "96 Minutes" [15] Colloff collected dozens of quotations from survivors and witnesses of the August 1, 1966, shootings at the University of Texas at Austin. The 2006 story became the inspiration for Keith Maitland's 2016 documentary film Tower . [16]

Notable work and awards

Colloff has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award on multiple occasions and has won once. Below are the pieces that earned Colloff these nominations: [6]

Colloff was also awarded the October Sidney for Investigation in 2010 for her pieces "Innocence Lost" and "Innocence Found." [17] The award, which was presented by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, was for Colloff's accuracy of reporting a severe injustice. [17]

Colloff was also the recipient of the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. [12] She was awarded this honor in 2014 for her "tenacious investigations into wrongful convictions, which have exposed deep flaws in the criminal justice system." [12]

Personal life

In 2005, Colloff married Chad Davidson Nichols. [4] They had been dating for over 10 years. [4] Together they live in Austin, Texas, with their two children. [6]

Colloff is of Jewish descent. [18] [19]

Related Research Articles

Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 2.3% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Innocence Canada</span>

Innocence Canada, is a Canadian, non-profit legal organization. Based in Toronto, Innocence Canada identifies, advocates for, and helps exonerate individuals who have been convicted of a serious crime which they did not commit and to preventing future wrongful convictions through education and justice system reform.

Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.

<i>The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town</i>

The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is a 2006 true crime book by John Grisham, his only nonfiction title as of 2020. The book tells the story of Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, a former minor league baseball player who was wrongly convicted in 1988 of the rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter in Ada and was sentenced to death. After serving 11 years on death row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence and other material introduced by the Innocence Project and was released in 1999.

Exoneration occurs when the conviction for a crime is reversed, either through demonstration of innocence, a flaw in the conviction, or otherwise. Attempts to exonerate convicts are particularly controversial in death penalty cases, especially where new evidence is put forth after the execution has taken place. The transitive verb, "to exonerate" can also mean to informally absolve one from blame.

Jeffrey Mark Deskovic is an American man from upstate New York known for having been wrongly convicted in 1990 at the age of seventeen of raping, beating, and strangling Angela Correa, a 15-year-old high school classmate at Peekskill High School.

This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.

ProPublica, legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists and published in The New York Times Magazine as well as on ProPublica.org. ProPublica states that its investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time investigative reporters, and the resulting stories are distributed to news partners for publication or broadcast. In some cases, reporters from both ProPublica and its partners work together on a story. ProPublica has partnered with more than 90 different news organizations, and it has won six Pulitzer Prizes.

Ken Armstrong is a senior investigative reporter at ProPublica.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Caldwell</span> American writer (1967–2020)

Laura Caldwell was a civil trial lawyer and also a law professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, founding director of Life After Innocence, published author of 14 novels and two non-fiction books. The latest book she co-edited is "Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted", which tells the true stories of over a dozen innocent men and women who were convicted of serious crimes and cast into the maw of a vast and deeply flawed American criminal justice system before eventually, miraculously being exonerated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Morton (criminal justice)</span>

Michael Morton is an American who was wrongfully convicted in 1987 in a Williamson County, Texas court of the 1986 murder of his wife Christine Morton. He spent nearly 25 years in prison before he was exonerated by DNA evidence which supported his claim of innocence and pointed to the crime being committed by another individual. Morton was released from prison on October 4, 2011, and another man, Mark Alan Norwood, was convicted of the murder in 2013. The prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, was convicted of contempt of court for withholding evidence after the judge had ordered its release to the defense.

The Illinois Innocence Project, a member of the national Innocence Project network, is a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California Innocence Project</span> American legal non-profit founded 1999

The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit, online journalism organization focusing on issues related to criminal justice in the United States. It was founded by former hedge fund manager Neil Barsky with former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller as its first editor-in-chief. Its website states that it aims to "create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system." Susan Chira has been editor-in-chief since 2019. It has won the Pulitzer Prize twice.

John Wesley Raley III is an American attorney based in the state of Texas. He is best known for his work in the legal defense of Michael Morton and Hannah Overton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hannah Dreier</span> American journalist

Hannah Dreier is an American journalist. She is a The New York Times reporter who specializes in narrative features and investigations. She previously worked at ProPublica, where she was the recipient of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, and The Washington Post, where she was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. She was Venezuela correspondent for The Associated Press during the first four years of the administration of President Nicolas Maduro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alissa Bjerkhoel</span> American wrongful conviction advocate

Alissa Leanne Bjerkhoel is an American litigation coordinator at the California Innocence Project (CIP), a law school clinic that investigates cases of factual innocence while training law students. Bjerkhoel was born in Truckee, California, and later graduated from California Western School of Law (CWSL) after previously obtaining a B.A. degree She has been an attorney with CIP since 2008. Bjerkhoel has served as counsel for CIP on numerous criminal cases, and achieved the legal exoneration of a number of convicted prisoners. Bjerkhoel serves as CIP's in-house DNA expert and also serves as a panel attorney with the nonprofit law firms Appellate Defenders, Inc. (ADI) and Sixth District Appellate Program (SDAP). She is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Bjerkhoel has won a number of awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Angwin</span> American investigative journalist

Julia Angwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and entrepreneur. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impact of technology on society. She was a senior reporter at ProPublica from 2014 to April 2018 and staff reporter at the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2013. Angwin is author of non-fiction books, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (2009) and Dragnet Nation (2014). She is a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

"An Unbelievable Story of Rape" is a 2015 article about a series of rapes in the American states of Washington and Colorado that occurred between 2008 and 2011, and the subsequent police investigations. It was a collaboration between two American, non-profit news organizations, The Marshall Project and ProPublica. The article was written by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and the 2015 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Clutter</span> American wrongful conviction advocate

Bill Clutter is an American private investigator, wrongful conviction advocate, and author. He is the co-founder of the Illinois Innocence Project and founder of the national wrongful conviction organization Investigating Innocence. His work on the Donaldson v. Central Illinois Public Service Company case led him to write the book Coal Tar: How Corrupt Politics and Corporate Greed Are Killing America's Children, which is the story of an epidemic of neuroblastoma in Taylorville, IL caused by exposure to coal tar.

References

  1. 1 2 "Pamela Colloff - ProPublica". ProPublica. Retrieved 2017-06-12.
  2. 1 2 Pompeo, Joe (2017-03-13). "Pam Colloff joins ProPublica, NYT Mag in new reporting partnership". POLITICO Media. Politico. Retrieved 2017-06-12.
  3. 1 2 Carter, Bill (7 February 1992). "Roger Colloff, 46; Led CBS Flagship To Several Emmys". The New York Times.
  4. 1 2 3 "Pamela Colloff and Chad Nichols". The New York Times. October 16, 2005.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Williams, Paige (19 March 2013). "Annotation Tuesday! Pamela Colloff and the innocent man, Part 1". Nieman Storyboard. Nieman Foundation.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Colloff, Pamela. "All posts by Pamela Colloff". Texas Monthly.
  7. ↑ Smith, Clay. "The 10 of 2010: Pamela Colloff, Journalist". Tribeza. No. December 2010.
  8. ↑ Dibrell, Denae (14 February 2014). "Writer who helped exonerate wrongfully accused visits campus". Hilltop Views.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Flynn, Meagan (2 July 2013). "A Q&A with Texas Monthly's Pamela Colloff on being a chiseler, advocacy vs. accuracy, and women's magazines". Beyond the New Yorker.
  10. 1 2 Colloff, Pamela. "Innocence Lost". Texas Monthly. No. October 2010.
  11. ↑ Colloff, Pamela. "Innocence Found". Texas Monthly. No. January 2011.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 "Investigative reporter Pamela Colloff wins Louis M. Lyons Award". Nieman Foundation News. Nieman Foundation. 13 December 2013.
  13. ↑ Colloff, Pamela. "The Innocent Man, Part One". Texas Monthly. No. November 2012.
  14. ↑ Colloff, Pamela. "The Innocent Man, Part Two". Texas Monthly. No. December 2012.
  15. ↑ Colloff, Pamela. "96 Minutes". Texas Monthly. No. August 2006.
  16. ↑ Sliva, Vanessa. "'Tower' shows 1966 shooting from ground." The Daily Texan . May 1, 2014. Retrieved on March 1, 2016.
  17. 1 2 "Pamela Colloff Wins October Sidney for Investigation into the Case of Anthony Graves". Sidney Awards. The Sidney Hillman Foundation. November 2010.
  18. ↑ "Texas Hillel Congratulates Pamela Colloff." @TexasHillel Facebook Group. Published December 13, 2013. Accessed August, 24, 2020.
  19. ↑ "Shirley Edith (Dessen) Colloff (Obituary)." Legacy.com. www.legacy.com. Published March 16, 2007. Accessed August 24, 2020.
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